


Gaze from the Abyss

by lunicole



Series: The Adder's Bite [2]
Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Emotional Manipulation, F/F, F/M, Genderbending, Insanity, fem!Hannibal, fem!will, male!Alana
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-10-01
Updated: 2013-10-01
Packaged: 2017-12-28 03:38:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,809
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/987219
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lunicole/pseuds/lunicole
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>No one can truly escape the heaviness that comes with being alive, even Will. The weight of her own existence drags her back to earth under the shape of an elegant pencil skirt and a delicately foreign accent.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Gaze from the Abyss

Will doesn’t know what she hates the most about this place. There’s the absolute lack of windows, the sound of her own breathing at night and how she’s not allowed to keep anything alive in that tiny little white cell that’s become her home. She doesn’t do much anymore, and she sleeps most of the time away, floating in that obscure numbness that she hadn’t experienced in years. There are no dreams or nightmares anymore, no sleepwalking and no waking up in sweats with the scent of blood all over her sheets. The drugs are working and Will isn’t crazy anymore, or at least not as crazy as she used to be.

She sits on the bed, thinks about her dogs, draws on the large, expensive paper that Doctor Chilton leaves her out of pity or genuine scientific curiosity. Maybe it’s not Chilton’s idea. There’s this distinctive scent to the grain and fiber of it, and whenever she puts ink, pens and pencils on it, she can’t help but to remember another psychiatrist in what feels like another life. The lines and the blotches of colour blend themselves into fantastic shapes on the cardboard. The movement feels familiar; it reminds Will of the lines she carved into trees as a child in the bayou. Paper comes into life, fantastic, surreal landscapes.

Doctor Chilton sometimes come for a visit, talks with her with that high-pitched, arrogant tone of him. His words are long and complicated, and he looks at Will with an odd kind of interest that makes her skin crawl. He knows the tricks and he knows that Will knows the tricks. That doesn’t keep him from putting a hand on her shoulder to establish physical contact, a half-hidden grin growing like a disease on his face. Will has to bite her lips not to grab his fingers and break them every time. 

He eyes her drawing with mild interest, says things about possible links between what he calls her “illness” and her hazy sexual orientation. There’s a file on his knees as he speaks, and it doesn’t take long for Will to recognise the elaborate calligraphy of Hannibal Lecter. The twirls of the vowels and the elongated strokes grab Will by the throat, and she almost chokes under the souvenir of pale, dainty fingers holding the pen and the knife with the same deadly elegance. She closes her eyes and wishes she could scream.

“You’re a very unique case, I guess you’re aware of that.”

Will doesn’t answer anything to that, her eyes on the wall. It’s too early to be talking to Frederick Chilton. His voice is annoying. She wants to go back to sleep, the comfortable, dreamless sleep the multi colored pills now give her.

“It’s always surprising, somehow, to see such a young, pretty woman suffer from your type of mental illness. There’s a distinctively dissociative element to it; is it because you’ve gotten in too deep with the maniacs you’ve profiled or is it because you’ve never had much substance to yourself to begin with ?”

Will grits her teeth. She knows where this is going and she knows that she doesn’t want to talk about her childhood with this man, especially with Hannibal’s files on her between his hands. Chilton smiles.

“Doctor Lecter -” 

Will involuntarily winces at her name and immediately hates herself for it. Chilton doesn’t need to know about that too. 

“Doctor Lecter has told me a bit about your family history. Abandonment can lead to a myriad of psychological disorders in a child.”

She chooses not to hear, closes her eyes and blocks everything out, but still, still there’s this nagging feeling in her chest and the need to bite Chilton’s face off his skull.

When night falls and they ring curfew for everyone in the sanatorium, Will lays in her bed, eyes on the ceiling. They’ve been restricting the number of sleeping pills she’s allowed to have, now, and the solution she’s found to silence her thoughts away is to keep herself busy, drawing more and more, reading books from the institution’s library. At night, it’s harder, and it’s in the warm darkness under her covers that the monsters come back rushing in.

Will’s body twists around the bed, somewhere between sleep and consciousness. It aches for Hannibal’s touch, fleeting dreams she isn’t sure are souvenirs of hallucinations. She feels the taste of her kisses, the softness of her skin and the tingling sensation of her nails into her thighs. There’s Hannibal’s sharp, dangerous cheekbones and the faint scent of carefully applied perfume on Hannibal’s throat. Her long blond hair has left its careful, tight bun and caresses Will’s burning skin as she towers over her, and her lips are red like fresh blood. 

Hannibal ends up between her leg, smudges her lipstick as she teases with her tongue, her fingers inside her. She is deliberately slow, but soon enough, she’s merciless, fucking her hard and fast, and Will moans. Will doesn’t really control herself as she grips her hair, forcing her down her crotch, obscene noises coming out as Hannibal buries her face there without even seeming to care about her ever-so calculated appearance. It’s arousing, and Will comes, many times, panting as she does, the silk sheets of Hannibal’s bed soaked with her scent.

Alan comes for a visit. He’s wearing one of those ridiculous shirts that never suited him anyway, trying to look somewhat distinguished. He made an effort to come here, looked at himself a few times in the mirror before finally deciding to drive here and enter Chilton’s kingdom of horror. It’s Thursday.

“Doctor Chilton told me you’ve been making progress,” Alan says, and his heart isn’t really there yet.

Will observes him for a moment, the dog hair on his clothes that painfully remind her of another life in what feels like another dimension. She hurts for him, and yet she can’t get herself to be honest with him. The smile on her face is a practiced one. It tugs the corners of her lips upward and forgets to add those thin lines on the corner of her eyes.

“The drugs helped. I’ve been getting plenty of exercise too.”

Her hands are carefully folded on her lap, and she wishes for a moment that there wasn’t this glass wall between them, that she could touch him. She still loves him, after all those months spent in that miserably clean white cage. Alan is like a glimpse of the sun in a darkened room, and she can’t help but to feel that ache of longing as she looks at him fidgeting a bit as he searches for the right words to say.

“I’m happy that you’re feeling better. I … “

He bites his lips, doesn’t dare looking at Will and suddenly there’s that soft growling of anger building up in her stomach. There’s guilt all over his body and again that paternal affection she can’t help but to loathe. She wanted his eyes on her and she wanted him to desire her like he would a woman, and she never got it. Now, she’s insane and slowly getting her mind grinded into dust by the pills and the therapies. Now it’s over.

“I tried to ask for you to be transferred into another facility, but you know, the legal complications and Hannibal...”

Will’s heart skips a beat.

“Hannibal thinks it’s better for you to stay here. She’s been your therapist in the last months, and I can’t just override her judgement, especially given the fact that I...”

It’s hard for him to let out the last few words, and doesn’t say what doesn’t need to be said. Will changes the subject with simulated candidness, and they talk about her dogs, the paintjob on her house that needs to be done, the state of her rundown pickup truck. Alan laughs softly like he used to, wrinkles forming on the side of his eyes, and Will misses everything.

Months twirl around themselves into a mindless monotony. The solace of her week is work-out day, when she gets to see the sunlight and run laps around the facility’s garden. It’s a surprisingly nice place, old trees and damp grass, and it reminds her of the woods around her house where she used to run with her dogs. The crisp autumn air has this distinct smell to it, and she breathes it in deeply as her body warms up. The jagged line of the fence that surrounds it creates a sharp contrast with the warm, earthy tones of the leaves and ground. The warden watches her, doesn’t speak, hand loosely wrapped around the white baton hanging on his belt.

It feels like her days in the force, being surrounded by men and constantly observed by them. She’s one of the few female patients here, and she’s probably by far the most kept together one. The only other woman she knows resides here is the wreck of a human being she saw once through the windows, with long grey hair haphazard around her head and that sad emptiness to her eyes. She didn’t look at her for too long, mainly because of the churning in her stomach as they eyes met and the feeling that she was looking into a broken mirror the whole time.

She doesn’t tell Chilton about this. She doesn’t tell Chilton much about anything, letting him talking himself into psychiatric theories that are both ridiculous and tinted with that annoying shade of misogyny every single of his glances towards Will let show. Her mind learns not to listen and lie the same way Hannibal Lecter lied to her in silences and gestures in what seems a lifetime ago.

Will is sleeping in her bed on a sunday afternoon when she first smells it. The dream she’s caught in is a hazy one, all on colours and sensations, but odour permeates into it pervasively, little by little, up until she’s literally drowning in it. It wakes her up, the smell of expensive perfume and a hint of mediterranean spices, and she blinks, believing she’d be staring at that grey wall on the other side of her glass cage. That’s not what she sees. 

She doesn’t gasp, doesn’t scream out of surprise and terror and anger and those thousands of feelings she has been hiding from for almost a year. She just blinks, once, twice. Hannibal’s cold, cold eyes look at her with that same detached care they used to have back in Will’s other life. Will herself doesn’t move at first, only observes, and Hannibal doesn’t seem to mind, with her perfectly applied makeup and clean, short manicured nails. A tight bun keeps her hair from her face, and Will suddenly wants to tell her how many times she has dreamed of passing her fingers through it since she got here. She doesn’t do it.

“You threw away the cheap cologne,” Hannibal says matter-of-factly.  
“I followed your advice.”

Will gets herself out of bed slowly, without a hurry, walks towards the glass wall in her too large white pajamas. The white tiles are chill under her toes, and the fabric of her pants brushes against the floor. Hannibal is gorgeous, of course she is, sitting on a chair with her hands carefully folded on her lap and that imperceptible aura of danger around her. 

“Why did you come here ?”  
“I worry about you constantly, Will.”

Hannibal’s eyes are piercing and Will can’t help but to be reminded of the way they only close halfway through the waves of pleasure. Will swallows, trying to make herself stronger than she is.

“That’s not an answer.”  
“I heard from Dr Chilton that ---”  
“No.”

It takes a few minutes of silence for it to happen, but Will has been waiting her whole life for this, or so it seems at this very precise moment. The mask slips from Hannibal’s face. It’s beautiful, in a way, how her eyebrows lose their false frown of sympathy to take that elegant curl of indifference, and how her mouth looks even redder under the cheap neon light of Baltimore’s Asylum for the Criminally Insane’s underground. 

“No,” Will repeats, and Hannibal looks like she’ll almost, almost smile.  
“I want you to be free.”

That does it for Will, and her eyes close shut. Hannibal’s voice is low, seductive, and she speaks about the things that haunt Will’s nights with a frightening exactitude. Will’s hands grip the glass helplessly, but Hannibal’s words are pitiless. It goes on and on and on, and Will is on her knees now. There are tears running down her cheeks, but she can’t really decide if it’s out of pain or ecstasy. She loses all sense of time and space, for a fleeting moment, and, when Hannibal falls silent, she can’t help but to clutch her chest with shaky hands, trying to hold together that something inside her that just broke.

The next day, Chilton talks to her about things she would rather not talk about, and it makes her heart twist painfully inside her chest, her palms itchy and her nails hungry for blood. It’s a new feeling, something she’s not used to, and she can’t help but to remember Hannibal’s impeccably white teeth as she tries to bite her psychiatrist’s ear off.

Things go downhill from there, and the few pills she manages to get her hands on aren’t working anymore. Chilton restricts her movements, confining her to her glass prison, takes away her books and sketches in retaliation. He doesn’t come to speak to her again, so it’s almost, almost worth it. Now Will is alone with her own mind and no pills to numb the power of her imagination. Sometimes, her thoughts wander towards Gideon and how he died, and it makes the sweat on her neck run cold.

That peculiar smell of wet summer warmth and stale beer fills her white room, some nights. Will is nothing but a little girl in a too large pajama and her feet bare against the cold tiles of the small cottage she grew up in. Mom is drinking again, elbows on the kitchen table and her eyes bloodshot from all the crying. There’s Bob Dylan playing on the old cassette player, and it’s been keeping Will from sleeping for quite a while now. Will doesn’t dare to walk into the kitchen, approach her mother and ask what’s wrong. From all the wisdom of her ten years of existence, she can’t exactly pinpoint why she won’t bring herself to step out of the poorly lit corridor. Maybe it’s because the other moms, the ones that come to drive her classmates home, with their nice hair and tall stature, don’t seem to cry nearly as much as Mom does.

Will watches and Mom keeps on crying even long after the cassette tape has stopped playing. She sees Will and there’s that spark of something Will has trouble giving a name to, that feeling Will herself felt when she saw a three-legged dog getting run over by a car, a few weeks ago. Mom smells like runny makeup and alcohol as she hugs her, and Will lets herself be led to her bedroom by Mom’s shaky steps.

By the time the warden realises that there’s something wrong with Will, her body temperature has risen in the forties and delirium makes her mumble things she herself isn’t sure she understands. They throw her into a bath of iced water to keep her from boiling her own brain up, and she screams.

Her body becomes an entity separated from herself, and the shadows surrounding her take care of the body, plugging it to various machines, feeding and watering it regularly. The voices around the body are talking about Will. She recognises Chilton’s meticulous pronunciation among them, and, once in a while, Alan is there too. The way he defends Will makes her long for their stolen kisses and the slight stubble of his chin. He never wins those arguments, of course he doesn’t, but it’s nice enough of him to be trying.

“Mentally unstable,” Chilton says, and “Medical malpractice,” spits Alan back. They are pointless debates, and Will floats over them, away from the body and its worries. Lightness has this nice fleeting feeling, now that Will doesn’t really belong to the world anymore. She has stopped speaking, stopped dreaming of murderers and ghosts of a past she has been trying her best to forget for decades.

No one can truly escape the heaviness that comes with being alive, even Will. The weight of her own existence drags her back to earth under the shape of an elegant pencil skirt and a delicately foreign accent.

“It’s time,” Hannibal says, and Will crashes back to reality, prisoner of a body that doesn’t feel like her own anymore.

**Author's Note:**

> I felt like writing a bit more about those two, and reading Nietzsche makes my muse rattle its cage.


End file.
